What It Means to Be 'Manly': Gender, Sport, And Primary School Students (Report‪)‬

Introduction The intersection of gender and age is both an important and interesting topic for feminist research. Work in scholarly feminist publications about children and young people tends to be dominated by text-based work. For example, special editions of Australian Feminist Studies dedicated to 'The Child' (2008) and Feminist Theory entitled 'The child and childhood' (2010) included solely text-based work, with no voices from young people or theorising of empirical research. Feminist empirical research about gender in 'childhood' tends to be viewed as related to education, and it is within these fields that it has been concentrated. One of the key journals here, Gender and Education, is listed by the ISI Web of Knowledge as pertaining to 'education' and it is not also considered to be a 'women's studies' journal (Hart and Metcalfe 2010, 147). Writing about masculinities also tends to be relegated to its own field, and has been looked upon with caution by some feminists (see for example Canaan and Griffin 1990). I argue that research on masculinities is intimately bound with feminist studies, and that there is a need to study boys, men and masculinity in order to move feminism forward (see also Pease 2002, 7-8). However, there is currently little research about primary school boys and masculinities from a feminist perspective (Connolly 2006, 141). In this article, I bring these issues of 'feminisms along the edge' together, and examine young age and gender in the form of primary school masculinities. To do this I draw largely on the feminist work of Raewyn Connell, and her concepts about masculinities, which have been based on the theorising of men and gender relations in Australia (Beasley 2008, 99).